<p>Which textbook(s) do you use for English Language? And how does a typical course usually progress?</p>
<p>Thank you :).</p>
<p>We used “Everday Use”, it’s a guide to rhetoric and how it is used. Also “50 Essays Anthology”, which is just a collection of short stories/letters/etc. That’s basically all we used, then we read about 10-12 books throughout the year. The teacher usually just gave us readings to do and then to annotate. We also spent half of first semester working with rhetorical analysis essay types, then the second half for argument essays. Second semester was all devoted to synthesis essays. We wrote essays ALL the time. Also, every so often we would do passages and questions. For some books my teacher had a booklet of questions and what passages they correspond to in the book. This is good practice for the multiple choice section. I personally also used the “Master the AP English Language Exam” book and I scored a 5 on the exam. Good luck to you!</p>
<p>In Language, we used Elements of Style, though I’m not sure if that counts. Mostly we read/analyzed books and short stories.</p>
<p>Language of Comp</p>
<p>My class didn’t use one at all…
My teacher taught it straight, and we read literature either from a direct copy or from an anthology of works.
In class we read The Scarlet Letter, Beloved, The Crucible, and The Things They Carried.
We only read them to break up essay writing/multiple choice work.</p>
<p>We use Shea’s The Language of Composition, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Prentice Hall’s The American Adventure, Cohen’s 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology, the CliffsAP English Language and Composition review book, and a couple others.</p>
<p>We didn’t have a textbook, but we used Scarlet Letter, Frederick Douglass, 1984, Frankenstein, Walden, and some others that I can’t remember.</p>
<p>Everything’s an Argument was our writing/rhetoric “textbook.” But we also read a ton of different works (poems, short stories, nonfiction, fiction, etc.) during which we kept a journal analysing the rhetoric and language of the author, had to read like five essays on proper ways to read, and had to write many different essays (causal, definition, research, among others).</p>
<p>We read:
The Scarlet Letter
The Great Gatsby
My Antonia
The Grapes of Wrath
Winesburg, Ohio
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Death of a Salesman
*our own selected book
*selections from 50 Essays
*tons of random readings</p>
<p>My class was given a copy of “The Art of the Personal Essay” arranged by Phillip Lopate (to keep, yay!), which contains an anthology of essays from the classical era to the present. Throughout the year we close read some of the essays. I think it did help me because the essays we read were ancient and for the most part harder to comprehend than the essays on the AP exam.</p>
<p>We also read a bunch of other books (like the autobiography of Malcolm X) and random articles.</p>
<p>Books:
50 Essays
The Great Gatsby
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Macbeth (after AP was done, so shouldn’t matter)</p>
<p>Basically we started off annotating readings and writing various rhetorical essays. Dealt with satire for awhile. Worked on a research paper that dealt with books we read over the summer. Spent the second semester working on open argument and synthesis very briefly (as in like 2-3 weeks). Did a practice AP test in the beginning of the second semester but never got the results back. Throughout the year we wrote maybe like 1-2 essays every month and had a lot of discussions.</p>
<p>That’s about it.</p>
<p>Shea’s Language of composition.</p>
<p>Also, we read:</p>
<p>Jude the Obscure
Catcher in the Rye
Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut
A Perfect Day for Bananafish
The Sun Also Rises
The Great Gatsby
Night
The Things They Carried
Macbeth (after the AP, though)</p>
<p>God, my class was really different than most I guess.
We wrote at least one essay a week every week this year.
We didn’t use any essay books or anything. Our teacher straight lectured and graded our essays hard so we’d have the “AP perspective”.<br>
Given, it did suck to get 4’s and 5’s on essays (which corresponds to a C letter grade) it improved my writing. When we saw examples of AP writings, we knew that we could write at the level required to pass because he had been grading us so hard all along.</p>
<p>It must have worked because we had a 100% pass rate, and I haven’t yet spoken to a person who didn’t get a 4+.</p>